Independent candidate Fabiola Campillai, who was left blind due to a tear gas canister shot directly in the head by a police officer during the 2019 outbreak, won a Senate seat in the elections this Sunday in Chile. Without a list to support her Campillai became the most voted candidate in the Metropolitan Region when you get the 15.14 percent of the vote. In another of the surprises of election day, the student leader Emilia schneider became the first trans deputy in the history of Chile.
“Justice for those who are not there”
“This triumph is yours, my reason and my fight”Campillai, 38, said in television remarks. After her historic victory at the polls, the social leader of the San Fernando neighborhood pleaded for “justice for those who are not here today and for all the people who have been violated during all these years“. Campillai assured that his main objective in the Senate will be the defense of human rights, in addition to” the dignified life of our people, health, education that is denied to our children and the social and territorial justice that all survivors have been denied“.
Campillai is one of the iconic victims of the violence recorded after the social unrest of October 18, 2019, in which 34 people died and 460 were left with their eyes mutilated by pellets or impacts of tear gas bombs thrown by the police in the demonstrations, according to the National Institute of Human Rights.
On the night of November 26, 2019, Campillai was waiting for the bus to go to work when a group of police officers fired tear gas canisters and one of them hit him directly in the face. The uniformed men did not give him medical help.
Neighbors transferred her to a hospital, where she was in an induced coma and underwent three operations. Medical reports indicated that his eyeballs had burst, suffered a head injury, with fractures in the bones of her face and skull, leaving her blind and without smell or taste. The policeman who threw the tear gas bomb was discharged and is in preventive detention while facing a judicial process.
First transgender deputy
While the young Emilia schneider, a candidate for the Citizens Party, she became the first transgender deputy, a position she will assume “with humility and great honor.” Militant of the left-wing Communes party, which is part of the Frente Amplio coalition, Schneider will enter the Lower House on behalf of District 10 of the Chilean capital after reaching the 5, 72 percent of the vote.
“This is a step thanks to years of feminist and dissident struggle“Schneider celebrated on his Twitter account. “It is a day of mixed feelings. On the one hand, hatred advances. On the other, there is hope”, said the former student leader regarding the triumph of José Antonio Kast, on the one hand, and his election as a deputy, on the other, while called to vote for Gabriel Boric in the second round.
Very excited, Schneider recalled in an Instagram live broadcast the words of the writer Pedro Lemebel, on the same day of his birth, “to that never again in Chile will there be a child who is born with a broken wing, who does not have a little piece of red sky where he can fly, something that has traveled to me throughout this campaign “.
Chile held on Sunday what was the first round of its presidential elections, in addition to elections for the election of the 155 legislators of the Chamber of Deputies and 27 of the 50 senators that as of March 2022 will have the Upper House. The far-right Kast and the leftist Boric prevailed over the other five candidates in the elections to replace President Sebastián Piñera, and will contest the first magistracy in the second round, scheduled for December 19.
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